How does Sabisu fit alongside my reporting tools?

Sometimes customers ask: How does Sabisu fit with or replace my existing reporting or analytics solutions?

Where Sabisu fits

Sabisu is a tactical platform. It’s designed for short to medium term decisions and tasks. It fits in between the strategic solutions at the top of the organisation and the SOPs which ensure operations stay functional.

Any extension tends to be upwards, with Sabisu being used increasingly as a strategic platform as organisations mature, e.g.,

• aggregating data from multiple projects makes it a great fit for portfolio managers.
• aggregating data from multiple sites makes it useful to executive teams.

Sabisu & Reporting Tools

Of course, the #1 reporting tool is MS Excel. It’s great for limited datasets. Sabisu is a natural evolution from MS Excel as an organisation wants reliability, scalability and a common, trustworthy foundation for everyone to share.

The most common reporting tools we encounter are Tableau, Qlikview, Spotfire and Business Objects (SAP).

These solutions have limitations:

• Like MS Excel they’re fine solutions for individuals but don’t scale. (BO does but is expensive)
• They have no connection into execution management. (All)
• They’re not enterprise solutions as such. (Tableau, Qlikview)
• They designed for data scientists or those with significant and specialist analysis requirements. (Spotfire)
• Also they’re not designed to integrate data from any source. (All)
• They’re useful for analysing some data, e.g., might be great with SAP but not so great with unstructured data, or process data. (All)

All of these tools are similar in that they’re excellent for some users, or some data, but not all of either.

Too often users deal with these challenges by turning to MS Excel, taking their work offline into a batch process they have to manually operate.

Generally users migrate reporting from these solutions to Sabisu when they want to:

• Make a manual reporting process automatic & real-time
• Escalate for action based on certain criteria, seamlessly connecting into execution management
• Distribute to and collaborate with groups of like-minded individuals
• Provide teams/individuals context-sensitive best practice

Sometimes users don’t migrate at all. For example, we have customers where Business Objects and the associated data warehouse provides valuable executive reporting.

We welcome this. Sabisu works well with these other tools and tight integration can produce excellent results, e.g., Sabisu leveraging a business data warehouse ETL layer, or even just a periodic output file.

Sabisu actually enhances these other solutions, improving data quality, providing advanced analytics or a connection into other processes.